Category Archives: Barrel Aged

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Quite a departure from what we normally do but my good friend Mark Hamzy has been playing with using Jester King’s mixed culture in many places, including making hot sauce! Mark shared with me his first small batch and it was a resounding success. Full of hatch and smokey flavor, noticeable sour bite; oh and hot! Mark asked me, how can we make it bigger this time?

Why not do 5 gallons and age it in a whiskey barrel? Neither of us had done this before and we didn’t exactly have a recipe. Our best guess was to come up with a ratio of hatch roasted chilis to beer and yeast. We brewed up a smoked-malt base beer, about 4 gallons, unhopped and targeting 1.040. While the wort was boiling we worked on de-skinning and blending up roughly two cases of freshly roasted hatch chilis.

After we’d collected enough chili we would mix in a couple ounces of fresh wort, some of the mixed culture and then pour into the barrel via a funnel. We’ll age this combination for many months, checking on it as we go, topping it off with both fresh mixed culture and wort to ensure we get it sour enough.

Now that the Battle Shed is up, it’s time to brew a beer and ferment it within with only ambient temperate to control it. I’ve had three beers age in one of my 5 gallon Balcones Whiskey barrel and have been waiting to have the shed ready to bottle the previous batch (Quad Damage) and then brew and prepare a Boxer’s Revenge inspired clone.

I brewed a test-batch earlier this year and the Boxer’s clone came out very nice. Slightly under carbed due to testing out new bottling method (pre-packaging yeast in gelatin caps) which worked well but needed a bit more sugar to get the right level. The taste and aroma were spot on. The only real concern was that it needed quite a bit more oak to make it more like Boxer’s. For this batch I’ll ferment it and again it entirely in the oak barrel.

Nothing special in the recipe besides using the Jester King mixed culture. Note: Mash @ 150F for 75 minutes. Enjoy!

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Dai Tajín is my first barrel-aged saison. As I mention when brewing, I struggled with what else to put in that Rum barrel and thought the saison would be a good bet. Early on, it tasted great, rum and saison perfectly balanced. Life got in the way and well, it spent a lot longer in the barrel than I had anticipated. At bottling, I just wasn’t sure if it was going to work out. I never picked up any real Rum flavors. This beer was bottled on Jan 30th, 2014, so we’re not even 4 weeks out in the bottle and the great news is that it’s perfectly carbed. This was something I’ve struggled with for the last 3 beers that have aged in barrels. This time I used The Mad Fermentationalist barrel-aged beer priming spreadsheet and it turned out to be just what I needed to get priming just right. Now, what about the beer?

Appearance: Amber to orange color, slight cloudiness. Solid foamy head which settles down into a thin, but persistent creamy head.

Smell: Tart fruits, slight funk (Bretty? won’t be the first time I’ve infected a batch in a good way accidentally), oaky, earthy. The tart, funk and oaky spirits really reminds me of Jester King Boxer’s Revenge.

Taste: Spicy, oaky, slight booze, long tannins and it ends dry. Slight carb bite, prickly. Very saison-like though the boozy nature makes it stand out from a typical saison.

Mouthfeel: Medium mouthfeel. Solid to high carbonation, but not past where I would like it. Tingly on the tongue but not distracting from the thicker smoothness.

Drinkability & Notes: I must say that I’m quite impressed with this beer given it was not something I’ve seen brewed before. I’m in love with the great nose and flavor, mostly because it reminds me of one of my favorite Jester King beers. While it’s not sour itself, it just begs to be innoculated. Next batch of Dai Tajín will be aged in-barrel with Jester King mixed culture.

About a year ago, I brewed my first lambic-style beer. I didn’t spend the time to do a turbid mash, but I did use the Wyeast guide for temperature infusions to provide a similar mash profile. During the past year, I’ve pulled a few samples, roughly once a quarter to ensure that the beer didn’t turn too acetic. Frankly, I’m impressed at how well it’s held up. This is almost entirely due to applying a layer of paraffin wax to the entire barrel. At this point, the year old beer is exceedingly sour, about 3.0 pH. It tastes full of lemon zest, sour grapefruit, medium oak, with just a hint of vanilla whiskey, due to the use of a whiskey barrel. Clearly not as neutral as the Lambic I’ve tasted from Cantillon, Boon, and Drie Frontain. Nonetheless, it’s entirely acceptable for a year old sour to be tasting this well.

For this year’s attempt, I’ve prepared a Rum Whiskey barrel. It’s had only two beers run through it, but it’s aged beer for nearly a year. It’s likely that there will be more barrel flavor contributed than the previous barrel, but that’ll be fun when blending.

Hot water rinsing. Filled and drained completely three times with 150F water. Soaked both heads as well.

Steam-sanitizing the barrel. I used the guide on Embrace the Funk to construct a barrel steamer from a pressure cooker and a few extras. This hits 212F and stays going for 15 minutes.

After cleaning, I used a heat gun to melt a block of paraffin wax. This took about 20 minutes. Much faster than double-boiler and basting it on.

The recipe for this year will remain the same. The only major difference is the use of aged hops versus a small amount of very low AA hops. Last year I used Crystal @ 3 AA. This year I used two year old whole-leaf hops. Originally they were about 10% AA, but being old and exposed they provide a much lighter hopping and hopefully a bit more musty, cheesy funk one expects from great Lambic beer.

Mash

Notes

After mash-out, drain all liquid into boil kettle, raise temp to 190, pump back to mash for second rinse through grain bed.

Pitching ECY20 Bugcountry in 11G barrel.

Brewed 2015-01-30- Mash pH was at 5.1, a little low- A little short on the sparge water; had extra but didn't get it into the mash tun. Ended up with 16G pre-boil, about .5 gallon short. Upside, pre-boil gravity was up, 1.048.- 90 minute boil completed fine, ended up at 13.5G of 1.057 wort.- Chilled with ground water (about 60F), directly into barrel at 70F- Extra 5L of wort into EL flask, parked next to barrel for some "spontaneous" action- Aerated barrel for 60 seconds with O2- Pitched half ECY20 from Sept, and Half ECY20 from Dec- 24 hours till active foaming fermentation. Ambient temp in garage about 60 to 70F. Much warmer than last year, no need for heat belt to keep temps above 50.- 5 days until 5L flask "caught" enough blow-off yeast and outside air; then full active fermentation. Smells very belgium-like.

This week at Woxford, we’re bottling 15 gallons of barrel-aged beer. A barleywine which spent nearly 4 months in a Balcones Blue-corn whiskey barrel will fill about 26 750mL bottles. The second barrel, an 11 gallon Rum barrel filled with Makkurokurosuke RIS will be transferred into approximately fifty 750mL bottles. The replacements have been brewed and fermented at this point; now just to swap contents and wait a bit more.

You may have noticed it’s been about a month since the last brew session. That may be more typical as the home schedule is filling up. That got me thinking about what sort of beers and ingredients I wanted to focus on given that the frequency of brewing is going to slow down. Recently we’ve been testing out new yeasts and blends and I want to see about doing a bit more of that, but with a single yeast blend. This blend includes saison Saccharomyces, some brett, and quite a bit of souring bacteria. The fun part is learning how to use both to get the beer to be just right. The tools are fairly simple: hops, temperature and time.

Larger amounts of hops will inhibit the growth of the souring bacteria. Higher temps will favor Saccharomyces, even though lactobacillus can handle and prefers high temp, sacc will out-compete and dominate. Lower temperatures, while not the best for souring bacteria, will favor a more sour beer due to the sluggishness of Saccharomyces at lower temps.

This is the hypothesis, with quite a bit of anecdotal material (in the form of really good beer) to back those assertions. But, the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. $240 worth of pudding.

This recipe will be the second farmhouse sour recipe. The first resulted in solid, but not sour saison. The Farmhouse Saison Experiement still need a proper review, but the result was a bit one dimensional despite using four different strains of Brett. The effort did help confirm that one cannot kettle sour a beer in an aluminum pot beyond about 3.8 pH. Bizarre!

For this recipe, I’ll split the wort post-boil and run two different fermentation schedules. The first, will be held between 55F and 60F to simulate a brew in the winter time (Texas) where the average temperature is lower. The hypothesis suggests this should produce a more sour final product. The second half will use a more typical saison schedule, starting around 65F, holding for 24 or 48 hours and then ramping up (and/or letting free-rise) until fermentation is complete.

The final products will be compared and contrasted. I may end up blending them in the end as well. In any case, this should be pretty exciting. Note the recipe says Wyeast 3711 for yeast, that’s the closest to Jester King Dregs, but it’s not the same (and certainly doesn’t contain the souring bus).